MCLEAN, Va., Jan. 26, 2007 (PRIME NEWSWIRE) -- Northrop Grumman Corporation (NYSE:NOC) has demonstrated its prototype system for national health information exchange at the third Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN) Forum today in Washington, D.C. The company's solution leverages and extends the functionality of existing local and regional health information networks, providing a common, scalable approach to national interoperability and information exchange.

Northrop Grumman's solution connects national laboratory, pharmacy and public health systems with three different and distinct health care markets: the Santa Cruz regional health information organization (RHIO) in Calif.; the University Hospitals, an established RHIO organized around the academic community in the highly competitive Cleveland, Ohio, health care market; and Quality Health Network, a new exchange initiative in Mesa County, Colo. Work in these regions demonstrates a nationwide distribution and the high variability present within the U.S. today, with vastly different technological challenges.

Following a successful debut this week before the American Health Information Community, chaired by U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt, the NHIN Forum brought physician users from each region to demonstrate how the Northrop Grumman solution can improve quality of care and public health.

"We have combined our experience running the largest electronic health record system in the world, helping the Centers for Disease Control with biosurveillance, and Northrop Grumman's extensive large-scale systems integration expertise, to create a system that can have a huge impact on medical quality, efficiency and safety," said Michele Kang, vice president and general manager of Health Solutions for Northrop Grumman's Information Technology (IT) sector.

Unique to Northrop Grumman's solution are two supporting services specifically designed to promote adoption. First is the "consent registry," a facility that allows a patient to control what information is exchanged and who may see their information. Second is real-time terminology translation, a mechanism to translate among the many "competing" medical terminologies in use today to ensure that any participant in an information exchange receives information in a way that can be incorporated and processed seamlessly with their own systems.

"This solution builds patient trust with unique privacy and security measures, while encouraging adoption by seamlessly integrating into physician office workflow," said Dr. Robert Cothren, Northrop Grumman's project executive for NHIN. "By providing the critical services and back-end connections, we have removed many of the technical barriers RHIOs face to connect with other systems and achieve maximum utility."